Monday, May 9, 2016

Today the Obama administration has filed a lawsuit against the state of North Carolina for their implementation of a "religious freedom" bathroom bill. The suit alleges that the bill not only violates federal law but in addition blocks protections for transgender people. The Justice Department's suit goes on to say...“stigmatizes and singles out transgender employees, results in their isolation and exclusion, and perpetuates a sense that they are not worthy of equal treatment and respect.” and that a person’s external genitals are... “but one component of sex and not always determinative of a person’s sex.”

Speaking directly to the citizens of North Carolina, where she was born Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the lawsuit...

“is about a great deal more than just bathrooms” and affects the “dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens.” as well as inflicting “further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share.... what we must not do — what we must never do — is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. This is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not, or invents a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment.”

The DOJ’s lawsuit highlights statements by North Carolina officials in support of the law, including a statement from Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, who has said that a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance in Charlotte...

“would have given pedophiles, sex offenders, and perverts free rein to watch women, boys and girls undress and use the bathroom.”

To prove they are the toughest toilet police and most anti-LGBT state around North Carolina Republicans have counter-sued the federal government for threatening to withhold federal education funds. This even after DOJ’s Civil Rights Division warned the state last week that the bathroom measure violated federal civil rights laws and would lead to the withholding of Title IX funding. North Carolina’s lawsuit against the feds maintains that the state is “protecting the bodily privacy rights of state employees” (just not the LGBT state employees) and that the Justice Department is engaged in “baseless and blatant overreach” of its authority.

Yes, North Carolina Republicans... You definitely wouldn't want some government agency engaging in a baseless and blatant overreach of it's authority now would you?